Air Travel Consumer Protection: a Metric for Passenger On- Time Performance

The raison d’etre for the air transportation system is the movement of passengers and cargo. Consumer information for airline passengers and regulatory consumer protection of airline services provide measures of performance using the percentage of on-time flights, and the percentage of cancelled flights. Researchers have shown that these “flight-based” metrics are a poor proxy for measuring the performance of passenger trip time that includes passenger trip delays accrued by cancelled flights and missed connections. This paper describes a Passenger On-Time Performance (45-POTP) metric to capture the performance of passenger trip time. The metric – the percentage of passengers that arrive within 45 minutes of the scheduled arrival time includes delays accrued by passengers due to cancelled flights and delayed flights, and reflects the stochastic nature of the process in a useful probabilistic form. A case-study analysis of the performance of the U.S. air transportation system in 2005 using this metric showed that the 90% of the passengers arrive within 45 minutes of the schedule arrival time across all routes. The percentage of passenger on-time arrivals at destination airports ranged from 82% (EWR) to 94% (SLC). The percentage of passenger on-time arrivals by routes varies between 66% (EWR to PHL) to 98% (SLC to TPA). A small number of airports and routes generate a large percentage of the delays. The implications of the Passenger On-Time Performance metric on passenger flight reservations and on government consumer protection is discussed.